Reversed footage has a strange charm. Water jumps back into a glass, a diver flies out of the pool onto the board, a demolished tower reassembles itself. The effect is a staple of short-form video, music clips and playful messages, and it is also useful in a practical way, for example to make a seamless forward-and-back loop.
This tool turns a video file around so it plays backwards from end to start. Choose whether the sound is reversed along with the picture or removed, press Convert, and download the result in the same format as the original. It runs entirely in your browser, including for clips several minutes long.
Why reversing a video is harder than it looks
Compressed video is built to be played forwards. Most frames only store the difference from the frames before them, so the decoder has to start at a keyframe and work forwards to rebuild any picture. To play a clip backwards, the reversing filter therefore decodes the whole stretch first, keeps every frame in memory as a full uncompressed image and then writes them out in the opposite order. A single 1080p frame takes about 3 MB uncompressed, so a minute at 30 fps would need over 5 GB, far more than a browser tab can hold.
The tool solves this by working in chunks. It reads the video's resolution and length, cuts it into equal pieces small enough to fit a fixed memory budget, reverses each piece on its own and joins them last piece first. At 1080p a piece covers roughly three seconds, at 720p about seven and at 480p around sixteen; small videos use pieces of up to 30 seconds, and a short clip that fits is reversed in one go. You see none of this except a progress bar that moves through the pieces.
Ideas for reversed clips
Rewind effects for social video
Jumps, splashes, falling objects and people walking look surreal backwards. Reversing a three-second clip is quick and the result can go straight into a story or reel.
Boomerang-style loops
Play the original, then the reversed copy, and the motion flows back and forth seamlessly. Join the two files with Merge Videos to get one looping clip.
Revealing hidden or backmasked sound
Keeping Reverse it too under Sound plays the audio backwards in sync, a classic way to check a song for backmasked messages or to create eerie sound effects.
Sound options, formats and speed
Sound has two settings: Reverse it too, the default, which plays the audio backwards alongside the picture, and Remove, which leaves the result silent, a common choice since reversed speech is unintelligible. The output keeps the container of the source and ends in -reversed. For MP4, MOV and MKV, each piece is encoded straight to H.264 with AAC sound and the pieces are joined without another encode. WebM and AVI pieces are stored in an intermediate near-lossless form and the joined result is then encoded once more to VP8 or MPEG-4 Part 2, so those formats take longer.
All of this is done by ffmpeg running as WebAssembly in your tab; the converter is about 31 MB and is downloaded only the first time a video or audio tool needs it. Reversing is one of the heavier jobs on the site and can take several times the clip's own running time, more on a phone and more again for 4K, where pieces are only a second long.
طريقة الاستخدام
- Drop one or more videos on the box above, or click it to browse. MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and AVI are accepted, up to 500 MB each.
- Under Sound, choose Reverse it too or Remove.
- Press Convert and wait while the pieces are reversed and joined.
- Download the reversed video, or all results with Download all (.zip).
Limitations
- The whole file is reversed. To reverse only a moment, cut it out with Trim Video first.
- Processing is slow for long or high-resolution videos, because every frame is decoded, held and encoded again.
- Very long 4K files may still run out of memory on phones; a desktop browser handles them more reliably.
- Reversed speech cannot be understood, so for talking clips Remove is usually the better sound option.